Since the gaps on here have gotten ridiculous and because it turns out a few people actually look in here now and then, it behooves me to get around to writing something.
There's been so much going on this year it seems like I haven't had time to take a shower properly, let alone write (yes, it's an exaggeration...it just doesn't SEEM like there's time to). Lots of stuff that should've been recorded while it was happening, but hasn't been. I've kept up with my blessing book reasonably well, so I can put in a few excerpts starting from somewhere around the time the last post was put in here.
April 8, 2010
My blessing today was getting a bunch of the first-floor ceilings at Beacon Square [new house] painted. Mark and I worked on it most of the day and we at least made a start. It's the first real paint we've gotten up, not samples. Uncle Matt and Aunt Christy stopped by since they couldn't be here Sunday when everyone else got the guided tour.
We haven't gotten much further since, as Beacon Square got trumped by Sussex and wedding work. But we'll get there eventually. I figure we'll probably move anywhere from October to December.
April 13, 2010
My blessing today was hearing Chad and Katie are engaged. They're thinking of getting married in July, maybe...
I got one lilac bush transplanted yesterday and all the root system for the raspberries dug up.
The poor raspberries. I knew we were moving, so I ruthlessly removed them and the vegetable garden from existance, but now that it's July I have this sneaking wish I hadn't been so hasty. But then, I've been slowly trying to get all the landscaping renter-friendly and it would've needed to get done anyway so...I'll just have to start a new patch at the new house next year and buy raspberries this year.
April 28, 2010
My blessing today was getting here [Keene, New Hampshire] safely and enjoying the ride. Which had some interesting moments, mostly due to incomprehensible directions given by Bob the Rock Guy in Montrose, Pennsylvania. He wouldn't give us an address for his house where his business is, just a cross-roads nearby. He said when we got close to call him and he'd give directions. So when we were about 20 minutes away, we called. And his directions (which even though he was on speakerphone, we who were supposed to be writing them down were only getting half of) went sort of like this:
"Okay, so you go down 267 forever until you end in a T-junction and that's 706. And there's this castle that's now a gas station and you turn left. Then there's a couple of roads, but you don't want to turn on the first one because that's a soft road - you want to turn right on the first hard road after the soft road. And there's this bridge and it's a new hard bridge. But then you keep going past a bunch of produce stands and a town of houses - but that's mostly abandoned now, so never mind - and you come to another bridge that's smaller than the first one and it's kind of on a slant and you have to go across. And there's this green sign where you have to turn right onto the soft road for a bit but then it's hard road and you'll run into this pile of boulders about two feet in diameter. You gotta drive on that for a ways. And there's this sign that says 'East Rush 3 miles' where you turn. And after the boulders, there's a cemetary with a red barn by it. And then you have to turn onto the road by the yellow sign - and it's a soft road, not a hard one - and go up a ways up the hill and at the top of the hill you'll see a stone wall and across from the stone wall's a blue house and that's where you want to go."
And then [I'm excluding our buddy's name...] got off the phone and said, "So, did you get all that?"
...boy, we got lost, all right. At one point we drove straight up a mountain on a one-lane gravel road and tested the Range Rover's off-road capabilities. That's when we went across the bridge that had a smaller bridge after it. And we saw SIX little cemetary plots with red barns by them. And lots of yellow signs but no produce stands. So we called again and the guy gave us the same directions all over again, only worse because he kept adding more landmarks to keep us from getting lost and jumping back and forth in the narrative to give them. When we finally did manage a fairly cohesive list, we did actually get there. The directions really should've sounded like this:
"When you get to the junction of 267 and 706, turn left. Drive until you reach a green sign saying 'E. Rush 3 Miles'. Turn right and drive until you reach a fork in the road. Take the left fork to the top of the hill and house'll be to your right."
That's from a trip we took at the end of April with some friends to look at Liberty Elm trees and Pennsylvania Bluestone rocks. Yup, we go on trips to look at rocks and trees. Don't ask. I think it's just an eccentricity. One of the most memorable things about that trip was travelling with three people who easily get very carsick. What a way to feel disgustingly healthy...
May 3, 2010
...[another friend] asked me yesterday if I'm available to make sugar cookies for the wedding and I said yes, though the logistics of making 400 or 500 sugar cookies - decorated - is one worry that'll probably hit me soon. But it's an interesting challenge and I'll give it my best shot.
It ended up being 312 (which was way more than needed!) and I'm working on another big batch (286) for the wedding in about a week. The refrigerator in the garage is half-full of sugar-cookie dough that I'll have to get busy on after sundown tonight.
May 7, 2010
...Cheryl says if business doesn't pick up soon, she's going to re-evaluate whether to keep doing teas next year or take a break until things get better. I don't know if I'll be glad or sorry. I'd miss the money and the challenge, but the extra time is always nice...
No more tea parties? It's kind of weird to think about because it seems like I've been doing them so much longer than four years.
May 31, 2010
My blessing today was James and Maureen's wedding. The last ten days have seemed divided between working Sussex, working on the wedding, and sleeping, with working on the wedding being the preferred activity. But the wedding was today and so I guess we're kind of back to our isolated existance. Unless we entice people over to work on the new house.
It pretty much rained all afternoon today except for one beautifully golden hour and a half when the sun shone so the ceremony and pictures could happen. There was a long debate yesterday about putting up a tent and James really REALLY didn't want to - but it poured all through dinner and all through the evening, a really steady drenching rain. If the tent hadn't been up it would've been a grand old mess; but as Mark said, he was almost glad it rained because at least James didn't have to feel his plans for an open airy yard got spoiled for no good reason.
Mark also said he's never looked at a bride coming down the aisle before and said "wow" because she was just so beautiful being all dressed in wedding clothes and so on.
...It's a perfect situation you could never in a millions years exactly duplicate, the best of all worlds.
The best weddings are where you believe that about the bride and groom. No worries, no doubts, no drawbacks. It's good.
June 3, 2010
...I've been working on the pool at the new house when I get a minute and tonight I vaccuumed it again - which meant I had to fill it again since I'm trying to get rid of algae and that means vacuuming it to waste [hey, these are all new terms for me...vacuuming to waste???] and lowering the water level. So I left the hose on and came home so I could do some stuff before bed, but one of the things took longer than I expected and when I got back the water had gone over the skimmer's fill line and was running out into the grass. So I worked by flashlight to pump enough water out to the storm drain to keep from flooding the yard and was really glad I hadn't forgotten the water. That would've been a big mess. Forget Gulf oil spills - this would've been momentous.
The worst thing about this story is actually that I did it again a few weeks later when I really did forget about the water. No more leaving it on when I'm not there for me.
June 4, 2010
My blessing today was getting the kitchen ceiling at Sussex all sanded. Most of it was very heavily patched, so it took me about five hours. And I thought I was tired yesterday. But it was a big roadblock and it's taken care of. None of us was looking forward to doing it...
The house on Sussex chewed up almost the entire month of June. We'd been working hard on it before then - pretty much since the end of March - but June was a complete loss as far as doing anything else went. We didn't even get any strawberries this year, we were so busy. I'm just getting the monthly shopping back in line, but a lot of stuff still needs catching up; I just looked at the sideyard of our house where our vegetable garden usually is and there are so many thistles you can't even see the ground. Grandaddy Adam, I'm definitely your granddaughter.
Sussex is all done, however, and the homeowner has moved in and is thrilled with her brand-new-old house. It got the complete makeover, that's for sure. It even has a new fireplace; and if you didn't see the before pictures, it'd be hard to believe it's the same house.
June 16, 2010
...We picked up another nestling sparrow last Thursday afternoon and he seems to be growing and thriving...except for his one wing, which may be permanantly damaged. He was in really bad shape Thursday, covered in blood from getting scraped up during the fall, his little belly all swollen and his wing all cut up. We held him a lot to help him heal, and between that and his wing I doubt he'll be a candidate for release. So we may have a new pet, which is very new since we've never had a pet before. He had no feathers at all, not even pin feathers, and his eyes were sealed shut when we first brought him in, but today he's nearly covered in little feathers and has been awake a lot looking around. I'm roughly guessing him to be two weeks old and am calling him "him" because it just feels good since his coloring hasn't told us his gender yet. I've carried him around a lot since he needs to stay warm and fed and we keep doing things like going to Aunt Sarah's wedding shower where we couldn't really do either without literally carrying him around in our hands.
"He" did turn out to be a "she", so our new pet bird is a domesticated female passer domesticus. She's fully weaned as of this week, and I was off by my original calculation of age quite a bit. She was actuallybetween 24 and 48 hours old when we picked her up, which made her only about one week old when I wrote in my blessing book. I did spend the whole shower carrying her around in my hand, which certainly winds up making for interesting conversations. She was so tiny at that point it was hard to tell unless she started peeping because she was hungry - curled up, she fit completely inside my palm with my hand closed. A lot of people have since told us "Oh yes, we raised baby birds before!" but it turns out it's fairly unusual for them to survive beyond a few weeks for a couple of reasons: one, because if you feed baby birds worms it gives them a parasite and they eventually get sick and die; and two, because once they've been handraised, they're not too good at surviving in the wild and they tend to disappear quickly.
I was shocked to learn the only type of bird that actually eats worms is the American Robin; sparrows and other passerines (finches, orioles, chickadees, titmice, etc.) eat all kinds of little bugs and seeds and berries, but not worms.
We also learned the the way to successfully feed a passerine baby is with soaked dry high-protein dog or cat food. Yup, dog food. Easy to get, easy to use, very successful at feeding baby sparrows with. And no, she hasn't started barking yet. She warbles and sings like a canary, which I didn't know sparrows did, but she doesn't bark.
We used Purina One Senior brand because it was reccommended on the website we found for raising baby sparrows and starlings (http://www.starlingtalk.com/). Bread and dairy products are bad for baby birds because they mess up their digestive system and don't have enough protein to help the babies grow right. Feeding them anything too liquidy is bad because it can go straight into the little holes under their tongue and into their lungs to cause aspiration pneumonia, so parrot handfeeding formula is definitely out even if it had the proper nutrients. Apparently, parrots are pretty much vegetarians and totally different from the average songbird.
There's been so much going on this year it seems like I haven't had time to take a shower properly, let alone write (yes, it's an exaggeration...it just doesn't SEEM like there's time to). Lots of stuff that should've been recorded while it was happening, but hasn't been. I've kept up with my blessing book reasonably well, so I can put in a few excerpts starting from somewhere around the time the last post was put in here.
April 8, 2010
My blessing today was getting a bunch of the first-floor ceilings at Beacon Square [new house] painted. Mark and I worked on it most of the day and we at least made a start. It's the first real paint we've gotten up, not samples. Uncle Matt and Aunt Christy stopped by since they couldn't be here Sunday when everyone else got the guided tour.
We haven't gotten much further since, as Beacon Square got trumped by Sussex and wedding work. But we'll get there eventually. I figure we'll probably move anywhere from October to December.
April 13, 2010
My blessing today was hearing Chad and Katie are engaged. They're thinking of getting married in July, maybe...
I got one lilac bush transplanted yesterday and all the root system for the raspberries dug up.
The poor raspberries. I knew we were moving, so I ruthlessly removed them and the vegetable garden from existance, but now that it's July I have this sneaking wish I hadn't been so hasty. But then, I've been slowly trying to get all the landscaping renter-friendly and it would've needed to get done anyway so...I'll just have to start a new patch at the new house next year and buy raspberries this year.
April 28, 2010
My blessing today was getting here [Keene, New Hampshire] safely and enjoying the ride. Which had some interesting moments, mostly due to incomprehensible directions given by Bob the Rock Guy in Montrose, Pennsylvania. He wouldn't give us an address for his house where his business is, just a cross-roads nearby. He said when we got close to call him and he'd give directions. So when we were about 20 minutes away, we called. And his directions (which even though he was on speakerphone, we who were supposed to be writing them down were only getting half of) went sort of like this:
"Okay, so you go down 267 forever until you end in a T-junction and that's 706. And there's this castle that's now a gas station and you turn left. Then there's a couple of roads, but you don't want to turn on the first one because that's a soft road - you want to turn right on the first hard road after the soft road. And there's this bridge and it's a new hard bridge. But then you keep going past a bunch of produce stands and a town of houses - but that's mostly abandoned now, so never mind - and you come to another bridge that's smaller than the first one and it's kind of on a slant and you have to go across. And there's this green sign where you have to turn right onto the soft road for a bit but then it's hard road and you'll run into this pile of boulders about two feet in diameter. You gotta drive on that for a ways. And there's this sign that says 'East Rush 3 miles' where you turn. And after the boulders, there's a cemetary with a red barn by it. And then you have to turn onto the road by the yellow sign - and it's a soft road, not a hard one - and go up a ways up the hill and at the top of the hill you'll see a stone wall and across from the stone wall's a blue house and that's where you want to go."
And then [I'm excluding our buddy's name...] got off the phone and said, "So, did you get all that?"
...boy, we got lost, all right. At one point we drove straight up a mountain on a one-lane gravel road and tested the Range Rover's off-road capabilities. That's when we went across the bridge that had a smaller bridge after it. And we saw SIX little cemetary plots with red barns by them. And lots of yellow signs but no produce stands. So we called again and the guy gave us the same directions all over again, only worse because he kept adding more landmarks to keep us from getting lost and jumping back and forth in the narrative to give them. When we finally did manage a fairly cohesive list, we did actually get there. The directions really should've sounded like this:
"When you get to the junction of 267 and 706, turn left. Drive until you reach a green sign saying 'E. Rush 3 Miles'. Turn right and drive until you reach a fork in the road. Take the left fork to the top of the hill and house'll be to your right."
That's from a trip we took at the end of April with some friends to look at Liberty Elm trees and Pennsylvania Bluestone rocks. Yup, we go on trips to look at rocks and trees. Don't ask. I think it's just an eccentricity. One of the most memorable things about that trip was travelling with three people who easily get very carsick. What a way to feel disgustingly healthy...
May 3, 2010
...[another friend] asked me yesterday if I'm available to make sugar cookies for the wedding and I said yes, though the logistics of making 400 or 500 sugar cookies - decorated - is one worry that'll probably hit me soon. But it's an interesting challenge and I'll give it my best shot.
It ended up being 312 (which was way more than needed!) and I'm working on another big batch (286) for the wedding in about a week. The refrigerator in the garage is half-full of sugar-cookie dough that I'll have to get busy on after sundown tonight.
May 7, 2010
...Cheryl says if business doesn't pick up soon, she's going to re-evaluate whether to keep doing teas next year or take a break until things get better. I don't know if I'll be glad or sorry. I'd miss the money and the challenge, but the extra time is always nice...
No more tea parties? It's kind of weird to think about because it seems like I've been doing them so much longer than four years.
May 31, 2010
My blessing today was James and Maureen's wedding. The last ten days have seemed divided between working Sussex, working on the wedding, and sleeping, with working on the wedding being the preferred activity. But the wedding was today and so I guess we're kind of back to our isolated existance. Unless we entice people over to work on the new house.
It pretty much rained all afternoon today except for one beautifully golden hour and a half when the sun shone so the ceremony and pictures could happen. There was a long debate yesterday about putting up a tent and James really REALLY didn't want to - but it poured all through dinner and all through the evening, a really steady drenching rain. If the tent hadn't been up it would've been a grand old mess; but as Mark said, he was almost glad it rained because at least James didn't have to feel his plans for an open airy yard got spoiled for no good reason.
Mark also said he's never looked at a bride coming down the aisle before and said "wow" because she was just so beautiful being all dressed in wedding clothes and so on.
...It's a perfect situation you could never in a millions years exactly duplicate, the best of all worlds.
The best weddings are where you believe that about the bride and groom. No worries, no doubts, no drawbacks. It's good.
June 3, 2010
...I've been working on the pool at the new house when I get a minute and tonight I vaccuumed it again - which meant I had to fill it again since I'm trying to get rid of algae and that means vacuuming it to waste [hey, these are all new terms for me...vacuuming to waste???] and lowering the water level. So I left the hose on and came home so I could do some stuff before bed, but one of the things took longer than I expected and when I got back the water had gone over the skimmer's fill line and was running out into the grass. So I worked by flashlight to pump enough water out to the storm drain to keep from flooding the yard and was really glad I hadn't forgotten the water. That would've been a big mess. Forget Gulf oil spills - this would've been momentous.
The worst thing about this story is actually that I did it again a few weeks later when I really did forget about the water. No more leaving it on when I'm not there for me.
June 4, 2010
My blessing today was getting the kitchen ceiling at Sussex all sanded. Most of it was very heavily patched, so it took me about five hours. And I thought I was tired yesterday. But it was a big roadblock and it's taken care of. None of us was looking forward to doing it...
The house on Sussex chewed up almost the entire month of June. We'd been working hard on it before then - pretty much since the end of March - but June was a complete loss as far as doing anything else went. We didn't even get any strawberries this year, we were so busy. I'm just getting the monthly shopping back in line, but a lot of stuff still needs catching up; I just looked at the sideyard of our house where our vegetable garden usually is and there are so many thistles you can't even see the ground. Grandaddy Adam, I'm definitely your granddaughter.
Sussex is all done, however, and the homeowner has moved in and is thrilled with her brand-new-old house. It got the complete makeover, that's for sure. It even has a new fireplace; and if you didn't see the before pictures, it'd be hard to believe it's the same house.
June 16, 2010
...We picked up another nestling sparrow last Thursday afternoon and he seems to be growing and thriving...except for his one wing, which may be permanantly damaged. He was in really bad shape Thursday, covered in blood from getting scraped up during the fall, his little belly all swollen and his wing all cut up. We held him a lot to help him heal, and between that and his wing I doubt he'll be a candidate for release. So we may have a new pet, which is very new since we've never had a pet before. He had no feathers at all, not even pin feathers, and his eyes were sealed shut when we first brought him in, but today he's nearly covered in little feathers and has been awake a lot looking around. I'm roughly guessing him to be two weeks old and am calling him "him" because it just feels good since his coloring hasn't told us his gender yet. I've carried him around a lot since he needs to stay warm and fed and we keep doing things like going to Aunt Sarah's wedding shower where we couldn't really do either without literally carrying him around in our hands.
"He" did turn out to be a "she", so our new pet bird is a domesticated female passer domesticus. She's fully weaned as of this week, and I was off by my original calculation of age quite a bit. She was actuallybetween 24 and 48 hours old when we picked her up, which made her only about one week old when I wrote in my blessing book. I did spend the whole shower carrying her around in my hand, which certainly winds up making for interesting conversations. She was so tiny at that point it was hard to tell unless she started peeping because she was hungry - curled up, she fit completely inside my palm with my hand closed. A lot of people have since told us "Oh yes, we raised baby birds before!" but it turns out it's fairly unusual for them to survive beyond a few weeks for a couple of reasons: one, because if you feed baby birds worms it gives them a parasite and they eventually get sick and die; and two, because once they've been handraised, they're not too good at surviving in the wild and they tend to disappear quickly.
I was shocked to learn the only type of bird that actually eats worms is the American Robin; sparrows and other passerines (finches, orioles, chickadees, titmice, etc.) eat all kinds of little bugs and seeds and berries, but not worms.
We also learned the the way to successfully feed a passerine baby is with soaked dry high-protein dog or cat food. Yup, dog food. Easy to get, easy to use, very successful at feeding baby sparrows with. And no, she hasn't started barking yet. She warbles and sings like a canary, which I didn't know sparrows did, but she doesn't bark.
We used Purina One Senior brand because it was reccommended on the website we found for raising baby sparrows and starlings (http://www.starlingtalk.com/). Bread and dairy products are bad for baby birds because they mess up their digestive system and don't have enough protein to help the babies grow right. Feeding them anything too liquidy is bad because it can go straight into the little holes under their tongue and into their lungs to cause aspiration pneumonia, so parrot handfeeding formula is definitely out even if it had the proper nutrients. Apparently, parrots are pretty much vegetarians and totally different from the average songbird.
I think we have named the bird Sal. We started calling her Sally Sparrow, after the character in the Doctor Who episode "Blink", but Leigh calls her "Sal-Sal" and Sal does seem to fit her better than Sally. Especially since she likes blueberries. One of my favorite books when I was little was "Blueberries for Sal".
July 7, 2010
...I'm having a hard time walking today - I jumped into the pool yesterday and hurt my left big toe so badly it swelled up and turned black and blue. I hate when people limp around so everyone feels sorry for them, but I seriously can't walk right until my toe unswells. It's the fourth day of 95+ weather and having a pool has been great even with a sore toe.
It's always a good thing not to have broken your toe doing something stupid. No more cannonballs for me, either. One injury's enough for me. Or rather, two - I came within a hair of throwing my back out for the first time the week after planting all the new bushes in the front yard and it's just now that I'm moving and lifting things again without getting nasty little warning twinges. My muscles were saying, "So you think you're real tough, eh? Think again, buster!"
July 14, 2010
My blessing today was working on [some friends'] yard. There was a sudden decision to put sod down in the back park in time for it to get established before Chad and Katie's wedding, which meant the back needed to be graded and drainage laid and all the sprinklers working. That's a lot of work to do in two or three days, so our families are running all around working on it and the other yard cleanup needed for the wedding...which is ten days from tomorrow. But everyone's having a good time in the process, I think. It's just not every day you get to help build a park!
Nope. That's where all the elm trees and rocks were going, too, and they look really great. What a summer for building things! I even got to drive a tiny backhoe a few weeks ago.
July 7, 2010
...I'm having a hard time walking today - I jumped into the pool yesterday and hurt my left big toe so badly it swelled up and turned black and blue. I hate when people limp around so everyone feels sorry for them, but I seriously can't walk right until my toe unswells. It's the fourth day of 95+ weather and having a pool has been great even with a sore toe.
It's always a good thing not to have broken your toe doing something stupid. No more cannonballs for me, either. One injury's enough for me. Or rather, two - I came within a hair of throwing my back out for the first time the week after planting all the new bushes in the front yard and it's just now that I'm moving and lifting things again without getting nasty little warning twinges. My muscles were saying, "So you think you're real tough, eh? Think again, buster!"
July 14, 2010
My blessing today was working on [some friends'] yard. There was a sudden decision to put sod down in the back park in time for it to get established before Chad and Katie's wedding, which meant the back needed to be graded and drainage laid and all the sprinklers working. That's a lot of work to do in two or three days, so our families are running all around working on it and the other yard cleanup needed for the wedding...which is ten days from tomorrow. But everyone's having a good time in the process, I think. It's just not every day you get to help build a park!
Nope. That's where all the elm trees and rocks were going, too, and they look really great. What a summer for building things! I even got to drive a tiny backhoe a few weeks ago.
So there's a little bit of what's missing. If we had pictures, it'd be better, but I'm doing good to get my hands on the camera these days so pictures will have to wait...
2 comments:
Are we getting an exclusive peak into Michelle's journal??? Michelle, I want to know who the person sitting next the (name excluded phone talker) was doing not taking directions herself when she probably could hear it better than you. Just kidding, you should go easy on her...this time.
Yes, this is an exclusive peek. Without too many incriminating details.
Now that you mention it...she should've been taking directions!!! Shame on her!!!
I guess I'll just let her off easy.
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